October 27, 2016

In the documentary film Iron Moon, quotes from this poem reoccur three times:

Rhapsody on the Advance of Heavy Snow

A snow factory in the sky. Mechanical

assembly line angels, stand day and night in the noise and fluorescent lights

numbly producing beautiful snowflakes

the work overload makes them vomit white froth

while the machines thunder all night. The overload

makes them lose control. The oozing snowflakes

crash down ton after ton. Suddenly my country is a swath of white

and the smiles of thirty provinces are pressed into tears,

the borders are crushed, day and night the army does repairs

and between the earth and sky, only the worker’s white heads

are revealed in the blowing snow,

torches and flashlight factories, overtime production

and the temples’ destruction. The backs of the gods are also broken

and their faithful followers have long since decamped.

The graves give away the game. The comfortable ghosts

have been forced back into the human world

hugging their gravestones and coffins, admiring the snow

while the threatened earth leans toward that snow-burdened edge

and slowly slowly slowly slowly starts to tilt

In a movie about manual laborers, one can see why this poem speaks directly to the issues at stake. Here, angels are overworked assembly line workers in the great factory of the sky. Snowflakes have enough weight to crush borders and bring ghosts back to earth. The temples are destroyed and only the workers are left out in the cold.

Such is the dark fantastical world of the poet Wu Niaoniao. In Iron Moon, we watch Wu in a seemingly endless and fruitless search for work at a job fair in the industrial zone in Shenzhen. The jobs on offer: forklift driver, coalminer, construction worker (skilled and unskilled), truck driver, assembly line worker, electronics assembler. The job Wu hopes to find: poet.

Here in the US, there aren’t very many jobs for poets: there are highly sought after university positions, editorial positions, and freelance writing gigs—all of those exist in China too, of course. But someone like Wu Niaoniao, who was born in rural Guangzhou and does not have a college degree, those jobs are unavailable to him, irrespective of his talent and interests. No one at the job fair is the least bit interested in his writing.

This is one of the overlooked tragedies of these workers, in China and across the world: the indifference of the economy to their aspirations. Wherever poverty exists, there will be a part of the society that works for a pittance and whose basic desires are ignored or frustrated. Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the cafeteria workers at Harvard have been on strike for the last several weeks. They earn approximately $22 an hour—a fortune to someone like Wu Niaoniao who might expect to earn the equivalent of a few dollars a day for backbreaking work. But a $22 an hour wage is not a fortune in Cambridge; subtracting out health care, basic food, and housing costs, and you’re looking at barely making ends meet. And at the same time, workers in the US and China alike are forced to abandon any pursuit that doesn’t help them make rent. That is a tremendous amount of talent being wasted.

I don’t have a solution. And I’m not sure poetry should be a vocation rather than a passion and an artistic pursuit. But watching poets like Wu Niaoniao struggle with the most basic requirements of survival, barely able to muster the time and energy to write despite their abilities, I think we as a global community can and should do better.

October 26, 2016

The other day I was listening to two of my poet-friends complain bitterly about their parents. Among other things, they talked of how they wished their folks had an interest in literature. No one in their families read books. I couldn’t join in. After all, I grew up in a house of wall-to-wall books. I will never be as literate as my parents, and I owe much of what I know about poetry to my mother who read aloud from my earliest memories. I used to frustrate her to no end, asking her to stop when I liked a line or poem, and read it again. And then again.

Not again? she’d say.

Just one more time, I’d say. And we’d go around and around.

And in my mind, later, I would play with the lines. So as a girl this poem might be:

What if you slept

And what if

In your sleep

You dreamed

And what if

In your dream

You went to heaven

And there—there was a rain shower

And when you awoke,

You were soaked to the bone . . .

Or:

And there—you discovered secret powers

And when you awoke

You could see through walls . . .

Or:

And there—your soul was made of sugar and flour

And when you awoke

You knew you were destined to be a baker . . .

Or:

And there—you climbed to the tip of God’s tower . . .

And when you awoke

You were still holding an angel by the finger . . .

I would keep going and going. This was one of the ways I passed my time. I called this game making-and-filling-in-the-blanks. I always liked games of fill-in-the-blank. My mother said if I continued in this way, I would never remember the correct versions of poems. She was right.

Some six years ago, Rick Moody and I were asked to talk about -- and write about -- Bob Dylan. Rick and I did our thing one enjoyable evening -- in January 2011, I believe -- and recent events have impelled me to go back and check out what we wrote then at the behest of Ken Gordon, maestro of Quickmuse. (When I find a link to Rick's piece, I'll add it.) I believe Ken gave us ten minutes and I don't remember whether he gave a prompt beyond "write about Bob Dylan." This is what I came up with:

The Jerk asked Cher about the Middle Eastand she said Honey I'm CherYou don't want to know what I thinkabout the Middle East

So the jerk went on to Robbie Robertson and asked him about The Weight and Robbie said Man it's lateWhat do you know about the Middle East

The poet Zheng Xiaoqiong does not herself appear in the documentary film Iron Moon, a movie about worker-poets surviving in contemporary China, but her poetry does. Zheng has worked a die-mold factory, a magnetic tape factory, a toy factory, and as a hole-punch operator in a hardware factory. She is one of the rare cases of a manual worker escaping the factories for a literary job by dint of her talent and luck. Now a magazine editor in Guangzhou, she has become known for her long, sinewy lines—some of her work verges on a prose poetry—and for her blunt descriptions of what it’s like to work in the harsh factory environments of contemporary Shenzhen, especially as a young woman.

A Product’s Story

First, it starts with a warped piece of iron sheeting, setting off from a village, iron mine, truck,

steamer, or port, then losing one’s name, getting a serial number, and standing at a workstation;

second is springs and assembly lines, the whinny of nervous motion, pain close by, aluminum alloys,

or a pit, a quick-selling ticket or a possible fake, squeezed in the aisles,

in the toilet, standing on tiptoe, crushed, you just want to find a place on the train or in the world

to live, to love, to slowly grow old

What strikes me first about this poem is the form: the long lines, the lists, the blocky shape. Then the specificity of the nouns and the physicality of the descriptions. Finally, the unapologetically female (though not necessarily traditionally feminine) voice. The majority of publishing poets in China are male, and that is all the more true for worker-poets. Many explanations have been offered to for why this is, and I’m sure there is some truth to the idea that girls, and especially girls from rural areas, are taught traditional values, among them the virtues of silence and modesty. I’m sure some women may be more sensitive to the oppressions of the factory environment, including prohibitions against speech, and internalize rules that then make it more difficult for them to write. But it is also the case that women poets are less likely to be accepted into poetry circles. Their writing is taken less seriously, published less frequently, and overall given less attention and support than work by their male contemporaries.

And what a shame. For in the work of a skillful poet like Zheng, we discover things that are absent from the work of male poets. The question of “missed periods,” a serious and common health issue in these dangerous, high-pressure work environments, is something I have seen addressed only in women poets’ writing, and for obvious reasons. Similarly, birth control pills are an omnipresent element in women’s lives, especially in the only recently loosened age of the one-child policy. Then there is the attention paid to food that is clearly not homemade, the “baseless promises of love,” the “proof of single status” required by some factories for their female employees. Perhaps surprisingly, there are more women working in factories making goods for export than there are men. Yet their words are still being overlooked and suppressed, both deliberately and as an effect of neglect. I hope the selection of work by women poets such as Zheng Xiaoqiong, Lizi, Shu Zhishui, and Wu Xia (whose work I will discuss on Friday) which I’ve translated in the anthology Iron Moon will bring more of these vital voices to the fore.

October 25, 2016

The poet Xu Lizhi come to prominence in one of the worst possible ways: he jumped from a high-rise in Shenzhen, ending his life at the age of 24. Before his death, Xu was not well known as a poet; he published very few poems during his lifetime, and he concealed his writing even from his parents because, as he put it, his poetry was dark and he didn’t want them to worry. The documentary film Iron Moon includes amazing footage of the cramped, cheap room Xu was living in when he died; all of his possessions can fit into a few paper bags.

Like Hai Zi and Gu Cheng, both poets of tremendous talent who committed suicide at the ages of 25 and 37 respectively, Xu Lizhi vividly expressed his isolation and desperation in his poetry. What distinguishes Xu is the kind of life he led. Both Hai Zi and Gu Cheng were college-educated and made their livings as intellectuals within a university setting. In contrast, Xu began working in factories immediately after graduating from high school.

Xu Lizhi came to international attention because his death was part of a spate of suicides at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. Foxconn is the world’s largest manufacturer of Apple products, and working on the assembly line there, Xu would have handled devices that ended up here in the United States and across the globe. His descriptions of the life he and his fellow workers endured are remarkable not only for their painful realism, but also for their sheer poetic power.

I Speak of Blood

I speak of blood, since it can’t be avoided

I also want to speak of breezes, flowers, snow, the moon

speak of the past dynasty, poetry in wine

but reality makes me speak only of blood

blood comes from matchbox rented rooms

narrow, cramped, sunless year round

oppressing the working men and women

distant husbands and wives gone astray

guys from Sichuan hawking spicy soup

old people from Henan selling trinkets on blankets

and me, toiling all day just to live

and opening my eyes at night to write poems

I speak to you of these people, I speak of us

ants struggling one by one through the swamp of life

blood walking drop by drop along the worker’s road

blood driven off by the city guards or the choke of a machine

scattering insomnia, illness, unemployment, suicide along the way

the words explode one by one

in the Pearl Delta, in the belly of China

dissected by the seppuku blade of order forms

I speak of this to you

though my voice goes hoarse and my tongue cracks

in order to rip open the silence of this era

I speak of blood, and the sky smashes open

I speak of blood, and my whole mouth turns red

What surprises me again and again as I translate Xu’s work is the incredible technical virtuosity of his writing, a combination of raw talent and self-taught skill. The repetitions that underpin the poem, the powerful nouns, the contrasts between the beautiful (breezes, flowers, poetry, wine) and the dark reality (blood, machines, rented rooms), the use of the direct address (“I speak of this to you”)—it all builds into an undeniably moving and forceful work. The fact that he managed to write so impressively while working 11-hour nightshifts and living in what we would find destitute conditions is a great testament to his talent and strength of character. That in the end he found himself defeated in the face of it all is a tragedy for world literature. Xu Lizhi was potentially a great poet in the making.

Tomorrow: Factories, construction sites, and coalmines may be a man’s world, but there are a lot of women in it. I’ll talk about the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong, one of the most prominent female worker-poets writing today.

CRUSH CURATORIAL Chelsea is pleased to announce “SUCHNESS: New Work by Eric Brown,” opening Friday, October 28, from 6-8 pm, and running through November 19.

Painter John Zinsser writes:

Eric Brown is having his first proper New York City solo show debut. He’s been a serious abstractionist for 25 years, while working as an arts professional, mounting shows for other painters and bringing a scholarly eye to the post-war American canon. He used to call himself a “secret painter,” but has quite visibly gone public over the past three years, with solo outings at Ille Arts in Amagansett and at a survey show at Vassar College.

Brown’s small-scale and medium-scale works are all about possibilities. Each displays a record of generative and transformational visual logic. They are mostly limited to two or three colors in hard-edged interplay. Often, a chromatic hue—orange, green, blue—surrounds silhouetted black form. The internal shapes can read as biomorphic figures, bulbous, symmetrical, often placed off- center in a kind of precarious imbalance. Two very recent larger black-and-white works employ shaped stretcher bar configurations. Throughout, subtly-inflected layerings of oil paint result in densely optical areas of flat opaque color.

Painted freehand, there is always a tenderness of human engagement. Mischievous absurdist humor runs against more traditional absolutist readings. At times, Brown allows a singular moment of “narrative” awkwardness to assert itself as a work’s central subject. Here, it’s like an invitation for the viewer to actively enter into the “crisis mode” of a painting’s own moment of coming-into-being.

The nine works in this exhibition capture Brown at a critical moment in his development. Following an intense three-week residency at the MacDowell Colony this past summer, each new effort has an urgency of purpose: stating anew the terms of the previous works.

Viewers may initially bring their own lexicon of indexical sources: Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Myron Stout. But the paintings resist such identification. They seem, in fact, adamantly non-appropriative. Instead, they arrive as “beings” among us—very much in the present.

I have long admired these lines in Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Unnameable Heart”: “There are so many / lives of which I know nothing. / Even my own.” As a translator of Chinese literature, I frequently encounter the foreign in various guises, but over the past year I’ve had a chance to become unusually closely acquainted with five lives that bear little resemblance to my own.

The following is a poem by Chen Nianxi, a poet who appears in the independent documentary film Iron Moon, which explores the lives of workers in contemporary China:

Demolitions Mark

Daybreak and my head feels like it’s explodingthis is the gift of a mechanized societyit isn’t the fault of steelit’s that my nerves have grown old and feeble

I don’t often dare look at my lifeit’s hard and metallic blackangled like a pickaxewhen the rocks are hit they will bleed

I spend my middle age five kilometers inside mountainsI explode the rocks layer by layerto put my life back together

My humble familyis far away at the foot of Mt. Shangthey’re sick and their bodies are covered in dustwhatever is taken from my lifeextends the tunnel of their old age

My body carries three tons of dynamiteand they are the fuse

Last nightI exploded like the rocks

“I spend my middle age five kilometers inside mountains”—that image alone conjures up a set of experiences that are largely alien to most of America, and especially to most American poets. The darkness, the danger, the arduous labor, the heavy machinery, the grime, the isolation. This is a man who does hard physical labor for little compensation, a person whose life is undervalued in the larger scheme of things. He works to support three generations of his family: his parents, his wife, and his child. Imagine the pressure—the explosive pressure—of doing dangerous work for low pay and with few protections, worried you won’t be paid when the job is done and knowing that even if you are the money won’t go very far, while the next job is always an uncertainty. Unlike in the United States, coalminers in China are piecemeal workers: they work one site, are paid (or stiffed by unscrupulous coalmine managers), and are set adrift again to look for more work. There is no health insurance, shamefully little recompense for injuries, and absolutely no security.

This is not unique to the coalmining industry. The same is true for hundreds of millions of people who have moved from the countryside into the cities to look for work, as China has proceeded down its path of economic development and rapid industrialization. This past year I’ve been translating the subtitles and poetry that appear in the documentary Iron Moon, directed by Wu Feiyue and Qin Xiaoyu. The film follows five workers at the very bottom of Chinese society who also happen to be accomplished poets, including Chen Nianxi. The project combines several things I consider vital: poetry, social awareness, an examination of globalism, and of course, contemporary China. I’ve also been translating the poetry of other Chinese worker-poets, and will publish an anthology of workers’ poetry with White Pine Press this coming spring.

David Lehman in New York on Walter Lehmann (a pseudonym of Gwen Harwood in Tasmania)There was egg on the face of the venerable editor §

Brentley Frazer: Creative writing with English Prime (Writing/speaking in the English language without the copula, i.e. excluding tenses of the verb to be) This failed; the process felt restrictive and laborious §

A.J. Carruthers: The Long Poems of (US poet) Rochelle Owens (Rochelle Owens has a website at http://rochelleowens.org) broaden the scope for future criticism on long poems §

Patrick Pritchett reviews Fugue Meadow, by Keith Jones (“Fugue Meadow”, his latest book, is similarly keyed around another path-breaking postmodern artist, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry who in 1969, with drummer Ed Blackwell, recorded Mu, a double-album that many consider to have sounded the first notes of world music.”)

And poems! more poems that you can believe, from all over the world:

Zhang Er: 3 poems (selected work from First Mountain (forthcoming from Zephyr Press)English version by Joseph Donahue) Is there any pattern to this labyrinth? §

Roberto Echavarren (trans. Donald Wellman): Animalaccio (A native of Uruguay and professor of world literature, long associated with New York University, Echavarren is the co-editor, along with José Kozer and Jacobo Sefamí, of Medusario: muestra de poesía Latinoamericana (Medusario: A Survey of Latin-American Poetry), the leading anthology of poetry in the Neo-Baroque style.) They hunted in the sierra, / ate in canvas chairs. §

Donald Wellman: God is love (Donald Wellman is a North American poet and translator. As editor of O.ARS, he produced a series of annual anthologies of experimental work, including Coherence (1981) and Translations: Experiments in Reading (1984). His poetry works with sources from several languages.) God resides in the heat / generated by the sense organs §

Marc Vincenz: 5 poems (Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British, was born in Hong Kong, and has published eight collections of poetry.) roped together / by words in a thicket of senses. §

Chris Tysh: 3 poems (Chris Tish is a poet and playwright and the author of several collections of poetry and drama. Her latest publications are Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic (Les Figues, 2013); Molloy: The Flip Side (BlazeVox, 2012) and Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K (United Artists, 2010). She is on the creative writing faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA.) pulls the plug on the lyric §

Eli Spivakovsky: 2 pieces (Eli Spivakovsky is a poet, prose and short-story writer from Melbourne, Australia.) and thought he was an angel so I followed him §

Joe Safdie: on Charles Olson (Charles Olson and Finding One’s Place: A lecture given at the Gloucester Writers’ Center, June 1, 2016) [slightly modified for print] 1:‘I’m a cosmopolitan,’ said my friend Jerry Rothenberg, when I told him the title of this lecture: ‘I’m not sure I want to find my place.’ He wanted things to happen in them spiritually §

American poet Dana Prescott, who lives for part of the year in Italy: 2 poems (And as she speaks, I feel seasick, / Strange brine and bile rising in my mouth.) It’s the wrong hour for a chat. §

New York poet Ron Padgett: poem: Mosquito Ron (“If only Buffalo Bill had read Whitman’s poetry, he might not have fought with Yellow Hand.”) But if I take a step back, I do feel sorry for myself §

New York poet Geoffrey O’Brien: 3 poems (“and shadowing at noon / the bare stone path / to a house / where strangers dwell.”) pleasure / is the appetizer and suffering / the main course §

Australian Professor and poet Philip Mead: poem: Ithaca Road (“You’ll be lost in the headlong city, turning older / The house can stay open for another October“) You’re always setting out §

From Boston USA: Ben Mazer: 2 Poems (“Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964, and educated at Harvard University, where he studied with Seamus Heaney, and at Boston University, where he studied under Christopher Ricks and the English poet Geoffrey Hill.”) Do not consume, like the flowers, time and air §

From Auckland: Michele Leggott: 2 poems (Forty pages of prose poetry from New Zealand) so you will need to keep on moving §

From Canberra in Australia: S.K. Kelen: poems (“Mohammed Hatim a wayward son of the Mujahideen, / Doan Huan sporting a Da Nang pedigree, or Mario / Lanza living out a serious fetish for muscle cars, Jim Giakos / Many moons from the post office in Kiama”) Juan got a bicentennial medal §

In Brooklyn: Pierre Joris: On Literary Dedications (“The first of these is the dedication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”) Lucretius gently imbeds the dedication… to his friend Gaius Memmius §

From Illinois: Kent Johnson: 4 poems (four acerbic verses on the 2016 US election) I talked to the Language Poets and they said no. §

American poet and editor Paul Hoover: 5 poems (“What shirt to wear to eternity / and tomorrow to dinner? / And what size will it be?”) crucifixion or / a game of tennis §

London poet and dance master Anthony Howell: 3 poems (“I have worked with limited vocabularies for many years, sometimes in texts where each and every word in a paragraph has to be employed in another paragraph.”) Always the same back window climbed. §

US poet Fanny Howe: poems from Love and I (“My son the tailor / Likes his shop shut but must / Open it for business / On the dot of the satellite.”) I would do anything for this infant §

From Melbourne, Australia: John Hawke: sonnet: Sea Priestess (“A fillet of cloud / flares to vermilion in the kindling light, / before the cycle of monstrous excavators resume / a droning cantillation.“) Emily is throwing knives to the receding waves §

Barry Gifford: Ode to Jerry (“I think about him every time / I hear “Ruby My Dear” / It’s a gift, recognizing beauty / in any form — Monk and Trane / were lucky to have had Jerry / listening to them”) Trane learned about beauty / from Monk §

Michael Farrell: When Arse is Class (“Well no one can sum up Australia / or its poetry, so we’ll just keep riding along till one / of us conks out.”) Bending over in forever shorts, Australian poetry §

Elaine Equi: 3 poems (”The paranoid dictator / will not notice us replacing / all the books in his library / if we do it one at time.”) not the Big Bang / this morning, §

From Kent in the UK: Laurie (Laurence) Duggan: 6 poems (“across the aisle / Josephine Baker / dances, her shadow / lifeless on the wall”) so the testes become a leg / an elbow becomes a signature §

In Canberra: Jen Crawford: 3 poems (“we haven’t bought scissors for the water in their faces tipping away like a ball if we’re sore in a little circle around a credit card account…”) dale and nina stack up horizontally in the bed §

joanne burns: 3 poems (“i’m sorry / i can’t remember the / director’s name was it / fellini, bergman, or tarantino“) everyone seems to rush / out before the credits §

In Geneva: Emily Bilman: poem: Greenness (“like bridemaids in a wedding, / cows congregate on the wetlands”) the hues of the evening / that soothe my breathing. §

Michael Basinski: 6 poems (“sure as shit he saw them / Buffalo ghosts in bathing suits / about July 10th, 1964 / ghosts most often appeared as sperm”) he came to life to lord it over me §

Rae Armantrout: 4 poems (“If any liquid / in a paper cup / were known as / ‘Love Your Beverage’ / a disturbing commandment / would be lifted / and we wouldn’t face / the hard problem / of deciding who / is addressing whom”) even as I see / … / that I am / not myself §

Elizabeth Allen: 2 poems (”I move frequently; I’m sort of on the run but I am not sure what from.“) to become angry §

Valerie Martínez is an award-winning poet, educator, activist, and collaborative artist. Her book-length poem, Each and Her(winner of the 2012 Arizona Book Award), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the William Carlos William Award, and the Ron Ridenhour Prize. Her poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, and media outlets including American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Poetry, the Washington Post, and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series. Valerie has more than twenty years of experience as a university professor. For the past ten years, she has been working with multidisciplinary artist teams through a wide range of arts and community development projects. She is the Founding Director of Artful Life which works to transform communities through the beauty and power of collaborative art. Learn more at www.valeriemartinez.net. "A Hundred Little Mouths” was commissioned and originally published in chapbook form for the Crowing Hens Whistling Project, directed by visual and performance artist Susan Silton. for SITE Santa Fe’s 20th anniversary event, November 7, 2015.

This week we welcome back Eleanor Goodman as our guest author. Eleanor is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center, and spent a year at Peking University on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome and was awarded a Henry Luce Translation Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her first book of translations,Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. The book was also shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize. The anthology Iron Moon, a translation of Chinese worker’s poetry, will be out in 2017. Her first poetry book, Nine Dragon Island (Enclave/Zephyr, 2016), was a finalist for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize.

Prologue: In late 1967, an English professor asked me to be Allen Ginsberg’s escort for his February 13 reading at Union College: “I think he’d be more comfortable with a student.” I wrote Ginsberg to ask if he’d add an event in our makeshift café, the North End. I figured I’d get a form letter from an assistant telling me Allen was too busy being Ginsberg.

I was half right. He was too busy being Ginsberg to make plans, but it was Allen himself who replied.

[Dear Mr. Z—I don’t know my schedule as it’s made up by others while I stay home & avoid correspondence & do my work — poesy, solitude as much as I can get. See you I guess there, I’ll keep yr. address & number thanks for good cheer — Allen Ginsberg]

Allen wound up staying at my apartment for three nights, before moving on to Rochester to meet with Norman O. Brown (whose Love’s Body was a hot topic). He visited classes, did radio interviews, and gave a reading at the North End (including “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and “Wales Visitation”).

Here, through the prism of distant memory, are some moments from Allen Ginsberg’s three days in Schenectady.

Fitz Hugh: Allen’s main reference point to Union College is that Fitz Hugh Ludlow went here. All we know about Ludlow is that he wrote Union’s alma mater in 1856.

Ode to Old Union (Alma Mater)

Let the Grecian dream of his sacred streamAnd sing of the brave adorning That Phoebus weaves from his laurel leaves At the golden gates of morning.

But the brook that bounds thro’ old Union’s groundsGleams bright as a Delphic water, And a prize as fair as a god may wear Is a dip from our Alma Mater.

Then here’s to thee, thou brave and free,Old Union smiling o’er us, And for many a day, as thy walls grow gray,May they ring with thy children’s chorus!

We have referred to the “brook that bounds” as the “creek that reeks,” and someone once suggested that Ludlow must have been high when he wrote it “gleams bright as a Delphic water.” Allen informs us that this, indeed, may have been the case, that a year after graduating from Union, Ludlow published The Hasheesh Eater. (Many years later, Allen would be on the board of advisors to the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library).

Dylan's Scarf: Allen notices the album jacket for Dylan’s John Wesley Harding propped against our stereo speaker, and points to the scarf worn by one of the people standing next to Dylan. “Dylan gave it to me,” Allen says, extending the scarf he is wearing.

Uncle Allen: Allen walks by the poster of him wearing an Uncle Sam hat. He stops, backtracks, and signs his name on the ribbon.

Bathtub: I awaken in the middle of the night and step into the bathroom, startled to see Allen Ginsberg in his underwear crouching over the bathtub. He is washing his blue jeans.

Milkshake: Cliff Safane, Steve Radlauer, Rich Balagur, and I are heading to the White Tower (a White Castle knockoff) down the street. We invite Allen to join us, but he declines. As we’re leaving, he calls out, “Can you bring me back a milkshake?” We explain to the young man behind the counter whom the milkshake is for. He smiles wearily at the Union boys having fun with the townie.

Kerouac as Poet: We ask Allen if he thinks we could get Kerouac to come to Union. He says we might, “If you invite him as a poet!”

Pigs and Beards: A local radio reporter asks Allen his reaction to the state government proposal to “put a pig in every pot.” Allen replies he doesn’t understand the question, and the radio guy repeats with "hip" inflection, “You know, a pig in every pot?”

I explain, “I think he means an undercover narcotics officer posted on every college campus.”

Another reporter asks him why he doesn’t shave his beard, and Allen replies, “I’m a traditionalist, my grandfather had a beard.”

Sunflower Tears: Word has gotten around about Allen’s extended stay, and I am fielding requests for his company, including overlapping invitations for dinner at a fraternity house and a visit to Professor Jocelyn Harvey’s Modern Poetry class. (See more about Jocelyn Harvey, one of my most influential teachers here).

We decide he can do both: I’ll signal when it’s time to leave the class and head over to the fraternity. But as the time approaches, Allen is reading “Sunflower Sutra” (“Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul…Look at the Sunflower, he said…I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions…”) He segues to Blake’s “Ah! Sun-flower”:

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Tears trickle down Allen Ginsberg’s face. He tells us he is having a vision of Neal Cassidy (“Dean Moriarty” in On the Road and “N.C., secret hero of these poems” in “Howl”), who died ten days ago alone in the cold and rain alongside a railroad track in Mexico.

No way am I getting in the way of this magic moment. I decide to blow off the fraternity.

(Several years later, a high school friend meets a couple of Union College graduates. My friend asks if they knew me, and one replies, “Yeah, he’s a real bastard. He wouldn’t share Allen Ginsberg.”)

Party Talk: At a party at our apartment, Allen is talking to the painter Arnold Bittleman. Bittleman describes how he often paints deep into the night, looks admiringly at his canvas, and goes to bed convinced that he has created a great work of art—only to discover in the morning that someone must have broken in and ruined his painting. Ginsberg replies that he used to feel that way, but now, even as he is writing, he’ll think: “This is the same old bleeeecchhh.”

A little later, Allen talks with two men about having children. Allen says he would like to have a child, but is not sure he could have the kind of relationship with a vagina that would require. A professor wails, “I’ll never know what it’s like to be pregnant!”

Classroom Talk:

Snippets (non-sequential) from a classroom visit, transcribed from a cassette tape that somehow survived being spindled after all these years:

“Our own inventions change our conditions because our inventions are extensions of our senses…what Zen is preaching what everybody is preaching is awareness of the conditions so we don’t get trapped in the conditions and ignorant of what’s moving us around…we can change the conditions.”

“The ecological disturbances caused by the technology have now gotten out of hand.”

“I’m not against technology and science. I’m calling yoga another kind of technology.”

“The whole funeral ceremony the Forest Lawn mythology of America; the way we treat death—unlike other cultures—gets to be that the sight of a corpse can freak somebody out.”

“Gee, it’s hard to know [what Buber is saying]. I haven’t read all through Buber. I went and talked to him…”

“You’re lucky around here at Union College, you’ve got trees.”

“Unlike the Western forms that say, ‘Hell is permanent, heaven is permanent, God is a bearded man and you better behave. Eternal damnation!’ IMAGINE: eternal damnation—a thing that couldn’t exist without language!”

After the Dodgers were eliminated last night in the "friendly confines" of Wrigley Field in Chicago, where the Cubs under Theo Epstein's executive management triumphed 5-0, an emergency meeting of the rat pack was held with Sandy Koufax as toastmaster.

The fellows voted unanimously to give Dodger field manager Dave Roberts a pat on the back for a job well-done. On June 30, no one thought the boys in blue had a chance of overtaking the Giants for the NL West crown, let alone defeating Washington to qualify for the National League Championship series. 'It was a great season," Koufax declared before fielding questions regarding his post-season heroics versus the Yanees in 1963 and his legendary refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur in the 1965 fall classic.

Sandy toasted his Hall-of-Fame teammate Don Drysdale, now deceased. Sandy said: When the Twins knocked out Don [game one starter in Sandy's stead], the tall righthander told [manager Walt] Alston, "bet you wish I, too, were Jewish," and Alston was impressed by Drysdale's use of the subjunctive. Frank drank a shot of Jack and talked about his duet with Elvis Presley in March 1960.

Dean sang "Volare" and modulated into "On an Evening in Roma": "Do they take 'em for espresso, / Yeah, I guess so, / On each lover's arm a girl, l wish I knew, / On an evening in Roma." Then he took a drag of his cigarette and winked at Frank, who sang, "Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away / If you can use some exotic booze / There's a bar in far Bombay." It would be up to Koufax to determine the itinerary: Bombay first, then Rome? Notice Sandy's thin tie and the elegant pocket squares around the horn, a dead giveaway. -- DL

October 21, 2016

Hello.I caught the fluthere is nothing I can dobut entertain myself as u-sual, it's fun reading your books which out of the blueput up sprigs of mistletoerapid random kisses ensueachoo, achoo, achooit's all a dream on my part I knowbut a good one thank youDavid I am walking on broken glass it’s socrunchy! If there's ice or snowI won't be able to check my email, it’s cold the wind is blowing, I blow you good wishes Blowyou in this case has a direct object O-kay master explainer of interpretive theo-_ ries of our day -- take care of you sweet egoYou friend, Reetika Alsodo Not get a FluShot that's how I got this horrible disease the fluI don't need a doctor I need a lawyer soI can approach the Nat’l Agency on Fluwith one sentence: I plan to sue!O, so do go ahead and get a flu shot we can suethem together just we twowe will threaten the agency execu-tives: Look you -- holding up a photo(exhibit A) of you with a silencer to your head, ready for death totake you The fluis a silent killer and to kill off po-ets is a terrible thing for a country to do!Achoo, is that your sneeze, God Bless You!

Secretary Mimi, caught by a security camera, hurrying away after her ‘secret speech’ to the Intergalactic Interspecies Assembly in the Paris Catacombs last Friday. In the background, long-time “good friend” and companion, Assembly President Calypso.

There is a cat… a calico Tom... with whom I have become fast friends.

He bears the good old-fashioned name of Foulques, is yellow, young, dashing, of soft claw and satiric eye.

Foulques and I first met when he wished to pay me an uninvited visit. A firm refusal accompanied by a virtuoso-level spine stroke cum ear scratch surprised him as much as his exceptional good grace in clearing off surprised me.

When later I told Foulques of my wonder at his gentle manner, he related that he too could not help wondering about that kick that never came, about a firm refusal borne in a sweet caress, about the personal story behind it all.

Somehow, though I never cease to speak of my Foulkes, Karine has never met this remarkable feline. Yet, Foulques & I, as do Karine & I, share much besides un penchant fort for scratching and rubbing; perhaps the stars are crossed in this.

Foulques and I have become the tenderest of confidants. The strong jawed calico freely recounts the stultifying dynastic complexities of being scion of Feline Mercury, the Cat House responsible for delivering interspecies communications. The natural great-grandson of Behemoth, Foulques listens with perfect sympathy as I, Peter Pan’s bastard, confide my own existential frettings and fumings.

And, if truth be told, Foulques, whose interests range from fossil fish anatomy to flapping butterfly wings, is no more made for delivering messages between species than I am for shacking up with Wendy.

I often call Foulques “Captain”. It’s his poise, air of command, I suppose.

Under a headline, “Assembly resolves human descent imbroglio”, I read,

After many months of wrangling, presentations from an interspecies team of geneticists sitting on the Intergalactic Distinguished Scientists Advisory Panel today showed Assembly members that humans, previously thought to be descended from simians, are, in fact, descended from felines, specifically, cattus cattus.

The finding was much anticipated.

Cats are a more developed order of primitive bear, the experts confirmed, which explains certain prehensile characteristics in humans as well as that species’ pseudo-bipedalism, that is, crawling often but not consistently.

Images comparing human ear hair patterns (above) with those of felines (above right) recently released by the Intergalactic Institute for Genetical and Memological Studies definitively point to a feline ancestry for human beings, turning up the heat on the Gradualist replacement strategies adopted by the Extraterrestrial Organization for Higher-Order Being and championed by Secretary Mimi. This photograph shows the remarkable similarity in hair patterns in feline and human ears.

The presentations brought about a much-feared political crisis as Immediate Replacement Committee activists seized on the confirmation as fuel for their drive for an early replacement of humans as the Earth Dominant Species by cattus cattus: on or before January 1st, 2016.

The current Intergalatic President and Secretary stand for what has come to be called a “Gradualist”

A life-scale schematic showing the feline-like hair pattern in the human ear.

approach with no fixed dates. The policy has been much criticized for foot-dragging in recent years, though its proponents have claimed Gradualism amounts to enabling humans to hang themselves with less fuss and expense than the Assembly could do through more direct measures. They point to global warming and the oft-multiplying, and always murderous, Isms scything down millions and reducing the morale of survivors. Such facts, however, have done little to blunt recent criticism of Gradualism, especially of its architect, the long-serving premier, Feline Secretary for Earth Affairs Mimi, whom many see as excessively silky in her dealings with other species and, especially, humans.

Before I continue with the second half of my essay, I would like to thank Managing Editor, Stacy Harwood-Lehman for giving me the opportunity as a guest blogger this week on BAP. I cannot express what pleasure it is to focus on a single poet during the course of a week. Thank you! Also, thank you to Stephanie Brown for spending so much time responding to my interview questions, and giving me permission to reprint “Stacks” in it’s entirety later in this post. Finally, thank you to Dr. Heather Treseler at Worcester State University for recognizing my sincere love of Stephanie’s work.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to write my first look at Stephanie Brown’s poem “Stacks”. I began with identifying the anaphoric inversion in her poetic line, which continues throughout her list-style poem from beginning to end and expresses the absolute philosophical resilience revealed in specific social and political situations. Librarians are not mere ‘keepers of books’ but represent a connection to community. The long-standing traditional perception that a librarian is a woman who checks books out at a desk is an antiquated image still conceived by members of the public. A librarian, like any other position, is not identified by gender, nor are they only responsible for printed words; a librarian, of which there are many different positions and roles, is involved with the community both in and outside the doors of Stephanie Brown’s “Ancient house” (line 7). Brown clearly states in her litanical verse the role and provisions of the public library:

Place to hide from bullies the

Opinion piece the

Children meet the

Service dog the

Fire the

Proper and calm welcome the (lines 16-21)

The library is a sanctuary, a place “to hide” and a place for conjecture whether others like it or not. It is a place for children to grow and experience programs, usually free, that they may not otherwise experience. It is a congenial atmosphere, sometimes quiet and calm and sometimes not so much when “Angry crazy shirtless the” (line 15). Brown’s poem pays homage to the history to the institution, both current and past. Her reference to “Librarian casanova Philip Larkin the” (line 23) is the longest line in the poem with the anaphoric “the” hanging like a cliff. Much like the determiner as the surface holding the anvil, here, “the” acts as the edge of influence. Larkin was not only recognized for his poetry and novels, but he was employed as a librarian for over forty years. The dedication to the profession and the public is not always recognized the way it should be. Following the Larkin line, Brown takes us on a rhythmic departure:

Cemetery plot dug open the

Ideas inside the

Spine broken the

Conversation the

Preservation the

Interpretation the

Empty station the (lines 24-30)

The nine-syllable line “Cemetery plot dug open the” has a quiet, simple tone that suddenly breaks into two lines opening with long i vowel sounds, followed by four lines opening with anapestic pentameter or hexameter (“Interpretation the”). At this segment of the poem the litany gets louder with Brown’s use of internal rhyme and “the” connects each active noun from one line to the next. Yes, “the” connects each line from beginning to end in her poem, but at this moment, and it is an important one, “the” drives the exaltation of political speech back to antiquity: “Rosetta Stone the” (line 31). Brown does not let us forget where the institution originates; the Rosetta Stone is a symbol of knowledge, language, and war. Napoleon once had possession of the Rosetta Stone, but it was taken from him after he was defeated by the British. The claim of ownership on knowledge, the desire to fight and steal for the sake of knowledge is the

Moment between thoughts the

Information beyond the

Beyond the

Limitless the

Sky (lines 35-39)

These final lines in Brown’s poem address the idea of possibility, the ‘if only’ we chose to recognize the weight of possibility in our individual lives and outer community, all is “Limitless the”. Brown’s “Stacks” allows us to peruse the shelves of past and present, reconsider the gravity of choice and experience. The public library, the stacks, provides an opportunity to be forged as expansive as the heavens. Shouldn’t we take it?

October 20, 2016

The following is part one of my commentary on Stephanie Brown's poem "Stacks."

I first encountered Stephanie Brown’s poetry in The Body Electric: America’s Best American Poetry from The American Poetry Review (W.W. Norton, 2001) and I recall so vividly my reaction to two of her poems, “We Librarians are Going to Baja” and “I Was a Phoney Baloney!”. Mind was blown. Period. The level of sarcasm and wit clung to my brain cells. What I cannot tell you is how many times I read and re-read these poems; the voice, style, structure, spoke to me in a way that I had not experienced in my reading life, and of course my (slightly) younger self connected with several themes (sex, identity, class) present in these two pieces. Who am I kidding, my older self continues to connect intimately with these poems as well as the broadening scope of Brown’s oeuvre. At the time I was working on my M.Ed. in Library Media Studies, and I only just recently left behind eighteen plus years of librarianship -although I keep my hand in at a lovely public library on Saturdays as a children’s librarian. It is hard to let go, and Brown's poem reminds us of the "Preservation the / Interpretation the" (lines 28-29) of the self and our greatest institution. In "Stacks," repetition functions as the forging tool.

Brown’s anaphoric inversion breaks away from the traditional use of anaphora often applied at the beginning of the poetic line. Instead, Brown places the repetition at the end of the line. Here, the determiner “the” enjambs each brief line enforcing unusual power in a three-letter term we often take for granted in the English language:

Democracy is the

Library is the

Temple of learning the

Dangerous the (lines 1-4)

“The” not only acts as a modifier, but determines the nature of reference. Immediately we are ‘in it’ drenched with political organization and majority because the people are the democracy and the “Library is the/Temple” of the people. The public library is a sovereign nation; it is all things to all people as it represents, dare I say it, the cornerstone of democracy. Conceptually, the opening term is quickly reinforced by “the” and this is the path we are on until we reach the poem’s end. Brown’s anaphora also forces the reader to move from line to line rather quickly, affecting rhythm, tone, and speed and all three of these devices radically position the speaker’s voice:

People’s university the

Cradle of civilization the

Ancient house the

Keeping of knowledge the (lines 5-8)

Notice the first two lines of the poem end with “is the”. We see an immediate radical shift when “is” disappears after line two and “the” completely takes over; it is the strike on the anvil. “Stacks” does not hesitate or pause, there is no punctuation housing the images of “Bad conduct” and “upskirt photos” (lines 13-14) or “the / Angry crazy shirtless the” (lines 15-16). We are patrons here. We wander through the stacks to seek and find. “Stacks” is a litany for all time. After all, the public library is a church of freedom; it is the one institution in the United States that is for the people.

October 19, 2016

Part 3 concludes my interview with Stephanie. I look forward to posting commentary on her poem "Stacks" on Thursday and Friday.

Another one of your poems from Domestic Interior, "Self-Portrait at the End of the First Half of My Life," maintains a perfect-pitch sardonic wit that considers self-reflective attitudes about societal codes on the body and pregnancy. I wonder if you could talk about how the Ring Lardner references may (or may not) connect to appearance and motherhood?

The Ring Lardner reference is really just so much about my personal reading growing up—I was a huge fan of Marshall McLuhan and he mentioned Ring Lardner’s quotation, “Some like ‘em cold,” in The Mechanical Bride. That book influenced a lot of my first thoughts about how bodies are viewed as commodities and as parts rather than a whole. The body is something separate from the life and the individual in it. I know that most of my life I lived with this feeling and belief. In fact, I did not know it was ever questioned until I read that book—and after that I read a lot more of the subject—art history books, costume and fashion books and feminist theory—much of the feminist theory I read echoed my own feelings about the body. Ring Lardner represents also a tough guy writer that I was fond of. I had a big crush and soft spot for those men city writers who were around in the early 20th century and the world of men they described. I think I was in love with them or they were my inspirations/muses.I loved the idea (idealized, of course and not real) of tough newspaper writer/fiction writers/playwrights who were hard drinkers, city-savvy, not innocent, elusive, and not at all domestic. A good example would be the whole world portrayed in the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. There is just a male, city, energy—I don’t know how else to explain it—testosterone?—that propels the narrative and I found it very attractive. In painting, the counterparts would be Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh. I just love the city of Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh.

Another big influence on me was Nathanael West. I liked modernist male writers, as an ideal. I never have liked 19th century Romanticism and now that I think of it, I really never liked those kinds of men the poets were; I have been more of an 18th century and 20th century reader and admirer. I do think some men “like’ em cold—cold, distant and not intimate. It is probably very much the case now with a lot of internet porn in people’s lives where sex addiction has a devastating effect on people. The best thing I’ve seen or read on it is the movie Shame with Michael Fassbender.

"Time, Waste of" (Domestic Interior) reminds me so much of an earlier poem, "I was a phony baloney" from your first book, Allegory of the Supermarket. It is not the mere use of the term "phony," but the "culture" that exists in each of these carefully structured poems. Does an underlying concept, such as "culture" determine or assist in the structural lineation of your work?

This question is just a fabulous question. I always feel intimidated by this kind of thing—to be completely candid, I don’t even know how to answer that. I mean, I think your reading of it is the answer—yes, I’m sure that I did that with my lineation, but it is more of an unconscious process that has to do with sound and making lines read how I want them to. That overall theme is definitely in the background, informing everything. I sort of can’t answer this except to say thank you for reading it this way. I mean to say that I feel inarticulate and unable to answer this using any kind of critical or interpretive language. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around painters when they describe their paintings—they don’t talk about theme or meaning—it’s like, “I wanted to use yellow, and white and round shapes were calling to me because I was looking at rocks in my garden.” That is sometimes how I feel when trying to answer questions about how I composed something.

Memory and addiction are prevalent themes in your poem, "Problems in My Interior Monologue” (Map Literary), which assists in developing an unreliable narrator who recalls moments that may or may not have occurred. Do you concern yourself with the reader’s accessibility?

Oh yes, I want to be accessible. I am completely on the side of the reader. I feel very strongly that way. Perhaps that was because I went to school when the vogue was for making readers do work, not caring about their experience, and lots of questioning of the role of “authority” in authorship being a bad thing. Deconstruction. So I was part of that era—and it made me really never use sentimentality and to be a skeptic. But the poems one writes under that influence are terrible. They are poems that need footnotes, not in a playful way, but in a deadly serious way, because the poet has not really finished the poem. I always felt it was as if the writers were trying to write their own scholarship. For instance, I went to a reading where the author gave a long explanation about the scaffolding behind her work—something like, “I used five Greek myths in a cycle to talk about my son’s death, which are the lines of the chorus which alternates with the straight narrative.” I think you should not talk about it or call attention to it in the poem. You have to be confident that that structure is strong and the reader will feel it—they should feel it, or why else use Greek myths?

One type of reader is the scholar who does find those things in the poem, but the poet should not be calling attention to it—I mean not just as an introduction at a reading, but poems are constructed like this too. It’s like, do you want to hear the recipe or eat the brownie? I want readers to eat the brownie. I don’t want them to know all the tricks and secrets. I think there is no reason to write if you are not writing for a reader; the purpose is to elicit emotion and thought from them. Making the reader work, tedious writing so that you can show your muscles and your talents—that’s just narcissistic writing. The older I get, the more I believe this. Writing is a craft. Last year, I was in a house that was built by hand. You could see all the dovetail joints, and the man’s craftsmanship with wood. You could see how he placed the windows in just the right spots to make the best use of the sun. But if it were not livable, what does it matter? In fact, it was a livable, joyous space: a gift of this person’s hands. You could see his dovetail joints—wonderful, musical, clever lines in a poem, let’s say, but the door worked, the kitchen was practical—it all worked together. It was a gift. Trying to not be accessible, on purpose, or as a technique, is either done because the person has to write in code, for some reason—or just is a selfish act. I’m dogmatic about this. I read a lot, and I love elegant, effortless prose and works that are well-edited—that have cut out all the boring parts, as Elmore Leonard said; or Faulkner’s “kill all your darlings. “ I like a delight when I read. Prose or poetry that one can read it easily without a lot of mental torture (which is not the same as complexity of subject)—that’s true artistry.

You've written, or alluded to your son's brain tumor in several poems including "A Foreign Country" (American Poetry Review). This particular poem seems to carry a different tone and level of emotion compared to many of your other poems. How do you control tone in your writing, and how does your son feel about you sharing these experiences with readers?

Again, this is hard to talk about as I don’t know that I always try to control tone; it’s just the way the poems writes itself, but I will say that I am much more intentional about making tone sound the way I want it to, now. The tone in “Scary Narcissist”...I tried to be weird and kind of ambiguous. I do control tone in that way, and I know how to intentionally do a deadpan tone. In the composition of the brain tumor poem, it started with that anaphora, and then as I was writing it. I remembered the funny moment when he talked about not wanting to die a virgin. I guess the control of tone, in this case, came from honestly letting the whole of the experience come to light. That in a very dark time, when I thought my son was going to die, there was a true moment of levity. And that is the true experience. Also that it was January and it was hot. Meaning that one could have gone in a cliched or sentimental direction and say that it was in the dead of winter, and also note something else from the experience that I did not—he did not want or take any pain medications after the surgery. I could have said he was “courageous” there, but that’s not true. He just probably has a high pain threshold.

I do attempt a conscious thing in my poems where I throw in a line that is unexpected to manipulate tone. An example would be in the poem “Notre Dame,” with the lines, “Even my husband / After we got back together / Laughed at that” which moved the whole story forward by erasing all the details that got the speaker to that point. I also have a desire to write poems now that might “break your heart.” I want to feel like I do when I hear a song where a young man is singing about his broken heart, or how much love and attraction he feels. I like to be moved like that. Time is short, we need to connect quickly, and I want to affect how you feel. If you can feel sorrow or feel happy, I want you to from my work. My sons and my husband—this is just part of our life, my writing, and we don’t talk about it. I don’t even think my kids are that aware of what I’ve actually written. I used to run a reading series (with others), Casa Romantica in San Clemente, where they heard me and others read. My son was at the reading where I read that poem—I had just written it—he still had the bandage and visible scar on his head. He probably doesn’t even remember this. It was more about the cookies afterwards, I’m sure.

After the surgery, he never wanted to talk about it and would never consider it as having been a big event in his life. I think because it made him different from others during that adolescent time of conformity. He is also a very private, quiet person who doesn’t reveal a lot. Once in a while, though, he’ll say something like, “Hey, I survived cancer.” I don’t know. My poet identity is sort of in a separate compartment. My older son, who is working in film, seems a bit more interested in the fact that I’m an artist.

Is a release of your third collection in the near future?

I just finished the collection and the title is Thanksgiving Dinner in a Rich Zip Code.

Besides poetry and essay, have you written in other forms and genres that we should be aware of?

I have only published these two, and some blog posts. I do write short stories and would like to publish a collection. I have that as a goal. I also have a topic for a memoir and I may write that. Life has to give me an answer, though, as to what happens in it and whether I will need to write it. I am living it now.